Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday July 08, 2009 @04:12PM
from the ok-it's-actually-stacked-on-top dept.

Bill Kendrick writes "My first computer was the short-lived 1200XL model of the Atari 8-bit computer line. I finally got ahold of one again, after having to settle with a lesser Atari system. My immediate reaction was: 'Damn, it's as big as my Dell Inspiron laptop!', and I couldn't resist doing one of those side-by-side comparisons, complete with photos of one system sitting atop the other. (I also put the 1983 storage and speeds in 2009 terms, for the benefit of the youngin's out there.) While in many ways the Atari pales in comparison to the latest technology they cram into laptops, I do get to benefit from SD storage media. It also still boots way faster than Ubuntu on the Dell, has a far more ergonomic keyboard, and is much more toddler-proof."

A pal of mine had an Atari XEGS. It looked awesome and futuristic, but was a bit of an oddball considering Atari already had the cheaper 2600 and superior 7800 out on the market. Apparently one could convert the XEGS to an XL so I suspect Atari just wanted to cash in on XL games that wouldn't run on a 7800 without a rewrite.

XEGS was actually just an XL/XE with built-in Missile Command and a funky, detachable keyboard. (The Atari 5200 game system was also similar to the 400/800 (predecessor to the XL/XE), so a lot of games were identical and/or pirated+ported.)

A pal of mine had an Atari XEGS. It looked awesome and futuristic, but was a bit of an oddball considering Atari already had the cheaper 2600 and superior 7800 out on the market.

Atari's problem seemed to be that they tried to do too many things at once and lacked focus.

Bill himself has already mentioned [slashdot.org] the Warner-era [wikipedia.org] 5200, which was a previous attempt at building a console derived from the 400/800 8-bit computer hardware. From what I know, internally the hardware was virtually identical to the 400/800, but for some reason they changed round the location of a few registers in memory and removed some of the OS. They also changed the cartridge interface.

Therefore, despite the hardware and most of the system being identical, the 5200 couldn't directly run 400/800 games (*1) and vice versa, even if you could get it to load them.

AFAIK, they launched the 5200 around the same time that the 400/800 was replaced with the XL line. The XL was backwards-compatible (*2), so it ran (most) 400/800 games and hardware, and it *wasn't* compatible with the 5200.

Why did Atari do this? Was it a cynical attempt at marketing? Or were the divisions within Atari just more concerned at scoring points off each other? It happens.

Anyway, the 5200 flopped, not least (I heard) because the joysticks were horrible.

Re: the XEGS. This was launched later on, circa 1987, during the Tramiel era [wikipedia.org]. I heard that Atari were originally planning on releasing the 7800 in Europe then changed their mind and launched the XEGS instead. Since the XEGS was (unlike the 5200) fully compatible with the 400/800/XL/XE line, it was probably a quick and easy way of exploiting existing hardware that had a lot of pre-existing software.

Thing is though, I later saw the 7800 for sale in Europe (more specifically, through Argos in the UK) and I think they sold the XEGS in the US anyway. So I'm not sure what the story was. I don't think Atari did either.

Then during the early-1990s there was the launch of the ST's successor, the Falcon 030. The ST had been quite successful in Europe, but was later overtaken by the Amiga 500 when the price of that came down. I *knew* that regardless of whether it was a nice machine or not, the Falcon 030 was going to flop because (a) Even then the ST market was seriously declining with no obvious likelihood of things getting better and the PC compatibles were taking over, (b) Atari probably didn't have the budget to do it justice and (c) Atari couldn't market ****.

The Falcon 030 flopped.

It was withdrawn after just a year or so, I seem to remember so that Atari could commit to the Jaguar console, but that was a relative flop as well. If they'd launched it properly, it might have done some business before the far superior PlayStation came out and wiped the floor with it, but they didn't.

Oh yeah, and the technically-brilliant-for-its-time Lynx was a flop as well, even though it should have done well.

Oh yeah, and the technically-brilliant-for-its-time Lynx was a flop as well, even though it should have done well.

The Lynx should have been smaller with a bigger BW reflective screen. The Lynx hardware itself was quite innovative, but its "huge" size and hunger for batteries made it a poor portable. The Game Gear was similarly troubled but Sega somehow managed to attract buyers though.

I still have my 1200XL, tape drive, Atari/BASIC cartridge, Jumpman Jr. cartridge, floppy drive, original Zork disks, and my Mapping the Atari book. This computer and my then pre-teen self attending a 6502 assembly class started me off on my technology love affair. I also still have old issues of Compute magazine, including the one with the code for keying in Lunar Lander.
Lost my modem with acoustic coupler, unfortunately.

You had to have a cartridge for BASIC? If you didn't hit a special button on the 800XL, you defaulted to basic. Sucked if you programmed anything, as you couldn't write to a floppy if you didn't boot from it.

It was a world where almost every kid grew up learning at least a little BASIC, because virtually all computers booted right into the BASIC command line. Which skill-wise puts the early 80s generation ahead of every generation before or after, young whippersnapper.

And many kids actually later started making their own little games. For FUN. Yes!

I loved my ASCII-art games, until I found out, that my crappy 8088 PC could do graphics on his black/green AGA (CGA+Hercules+Monochrome) graphics system. Then I got really sad that I did not find it out earlier.My father was such a cheap ass. Wanna know what computer I wanted when I got that thing instead?A 386DX with 33 MHz! Yes. That's how old that thing was!

As primitive as the world is today, the world I grew up in was WAY primitive. Computers took entire buildings to house but were less powerful than a pocket calculator (my "pocket calculator" was a slide rule), there were no mice, no laser pointers (no lasers at all). there was color TV but only one family in the neighborhood could afford one and besides there were only two station (this was in St Louis, a major metropolis). No VCRs, no video games, no microwave ovens, no cordless phones (the phones had dials instead of buttons), no remote controls. Cars had no fuel injectors, air bags, or seat belts. Most electronics still used tubes. No accomodating lenses for cataract patients (in fact the first IOL was developed only a few years before I was born). Most folks didn't have air conditioning, and nobody had air in their cars. Cars only had AM radio.

When Star Trek came on TV (I was 12 iirc) everything about it was pure science fiction - doors that opened by themselves (now every grocery has them), flat screen desktop computers, "communicators" (cell phones), etc.

You don't realise how primitive your world is until you get older. I can't imagine some of the stuff you guys will get to see. I never dreamed that some day I wouldn't have to wear glasses!

Hell, the laser didn't exist until I was 8 or 9. Talk about primitive.

Computers took entire buildings to house but were less powerful than a pocket calculator

A very common misconception. Actually they were far, far more powerful than any modern computer. One mainframe could run multinational corporations, put a man on the moon, etc. In comparison, on a good day, a modern computer might be able to balance my checkbook, with alot of help, play a game, or maybe replay some music.

That is what motivates people like myself toward retrocomputing... Its not that its a low clock speed, who cares about that, but that on my desk I can now use technology that ran entire research labs, major corporations, etc.

You can either learn how to solve scalable, ultra high reliability, enterprise grade computing problems by studying how the ancients solved those problems, or flail around blindly while re-learning the ancient's wisdom... Your choice.

Power is applied by changing the world, not toggling a flipflop at GHz speeds but not really doing anything out in the world.

A world without insanely cheap, plentiful CPU cycles, digital mass storage and RAM. Therefore, games were all analog and generally involved things called balls, and lots of dirt, and it carried the risk of a range of bodily injuries from scuffed knees to broken bones. Similarly, porn was recorded in analog form -- i.e., stored in your biological neural network (aka, "spank bank") -- for, ahem, later retrieval. If you were lucky, you could find a photographic al

We lived in the kind of world where one could fully reboot a computer faster than one could type the words "full reboot". We lived in a world where installing a program was faster than ejecting a DVD. We lived in a world where one could double your storage with a hole punch.

Slashdot's continuing trend to post stories late continues, with one now finally exiting the queue that came from 1983. And even then; The 1200xl was so horrible that people bought up its predecessor to avoid having to succumb to the evil. Someone quick, draw an analogy to the current Vista v. XP debacle as a distraction while I run away now!

The 1200xl was so horrible that people bought up its predecessor to avoid having to succumb to the evil

As far as I'm aware the 1200XL had two problems that caused this; intentionally "closed" design with a lack of expandability (and loss of compatibility with some older peripherals), and also some software incompatibility with older 400/800 software.

This is why (AFAIK) it was replaced with the 600XL and 800XL computers.

Unfortunately, the Atari trakball is digital so you don't get that much benefit from using the trackball over a regular joystick. If you want to play a real game of Missile Command, you need an Atari 5200, and it's giant ass trackball.

Digital in the same sense that a ball-based mouse on a PC is digital. Though the Trak-Ball I have also has a switch to change between trackball and joystick mode, so you can play joystick-based games with it.

I bet you could find an original 100XT today and still get it running. Those were available.. what, mid-1980's? That's getting close to 27 years... though not quite yet, so can't be 100% sure. Just as you can't be 100% sure that if somebody keeps that dell laying about for 27 years, it won't start back up.

At least with the Dell, you won't have to worry about finding a display, etc. Just a power source.. that should still be doable in 27 years, long after the battery's died you can still hook it up to -a

Heh. I _already_ can't seem to get a replacement keyboard from Dell.:^( (They've got all sorts of wireless crap they can sell me.) Maybe I didn't dig around the service section of their website long enough.

I booted my Atari 800XL with disk drive just a year ago, to test. It booted DOS fine and its own unique ''self test'' was all fine. BTW for people who never seen/used them, ''diskette drive'' on 8bit age (except Woz'es genius Apple) is actually a computer, having same CPU as the main computer and ''chats'' to computer via serial port. That is why diskette drive still working is a big deal.

BTW, Atari 8bit diskette/printer port provided chaining support, you could plug 3-4 diskette drives and a printer to the

What percentage of 1200XLs still function, do you think? Remember that people think "they made stuff better 100 years ago", but that's because only the stuff that was any good in the first place survived 100 years of use. Plenty of crap was made back then too, but it's not around to admire.

He amazed the local townfolk when be brought a portable radio he built to the town square and demonstrated it. It was tube powered, the size of a suitcase, and ran on lead acid batteries. It was portable in the sense that a strong man could lift it.

One thing my generation (I was born in 1961) experienced was the decline of analog. See, we worried about the linearity of our amplifiers, the flatness of the response curves of equipme

No, for a direct clock speed comparison, those are correct. However, a modern PC processor can do things like a 64-bit integer multiply in a single instruction (and I'm fairly sure a single cycle). The 6502 would require tens (possibly hundreds) of instructions for that type of operation, more for division, and significantly more for floating point. It would depend on the application, so you couldn't quote a single number, but a modern PC is much more than 1117x

Of course, being designed by Jay Miner before he joined Amiga team, Atari 8 bit series also have custom chips that does wonders (in terms of 8bit) when used right. For example, writing a ASM code which will glue itself to raster scan (under BASIC even) was the thing all nerd Atari users knew. They were using it against C64 fanatics since you had 256 colours on screen at once with zero CPU cost. Just imagine what real developers did.

Today, in 2009, we are debating if the GPUs which already has h264 decoding

I've paid more attention to the SID in some Commodores, but I was quite impressed with the nasty, gritty POKEY sound in these Atari 8-bit demos: Zero [youtube.com], Pure [youtube.com], Unfused [youtube.com], Recall [youtube.com]... I don't even know if those are the best. (I do have an 800 XL somewhere but precious little working software, most importantly Archon.) The PC beeper was one reason not to envy PC users...

...on boot time, I reckon. The Dell will still be flipping through its BIOS screens when the Atari has checked its RAM and started its OS from ROM.

Seems to be a trend - my (1981) ZX81 started almost instantly, the ZX Spectrum (1982) took a few seconds, my Atari ST (1987) a bit longer, and these days a PC needs to check a couple of gigs of RAM and load a bloated OS from disk....

As nifty as your comparison is I've always found that the computing experience is based more on the ass in the chair than the box on the desk.

In other words: I knew how to get more out of my Commodore 64 at the age of 17 than my 17 year old nephew can get out of his Dell. At least as far as how to do it without Google support and a slew of gadgets and gimmicks.

This reminds me of one of the most impressive things about my Atari 800XL. I ran into this error when I first started to learn anything about computers. I was thoroughly stumped. (I was also 8 years old.)

I wrote a letter to Atari (using Atari Writer!) and I got a reply back in the mail just a few weeks later. They told me what I did wrong, included a bunch of software, an Atari BASIC book and a years subscription to Antic.

Ahhh. The days when technology companies were run by engineers for engineers, not marketing whores worshipping their quarterly bonus.

I suspect that some nice people in engineering were responsible for that. But except possibly for their early days (long before the GP's 800XL was even launched), Atari were never the company you dream of.

They considered software writers to be little better than towel designers, which caused many of their most talented people to leave and form Activision- hence starting off the massive market in third-party VCS games. They considered licenses and such more important than good software, resulting in them r

I like your story. It reminds me of the time I was having a problem with an Epson MX-80 printer. I found the phone number for the company via information and in a few minutes I was surprised to be talking to the actual president of Epson America. Instead of directing my call elsewhere, he actually took a few minutes to help me troubleshoot my problem. Yep, all in all, I think I liked computers better when I was the only guy I knew who had one.

When I was in the fourth grade I wrote a letter to Jack(or Sam, I don't recall) Tramiel, the president of Atari. I had a few ideas for video games, and I got a personal letter back. Quite an awesome experience for me at the time. I need to dig out that letter.

Oooh oooh I know! Compare an Asus EeePC to a Speak and Spell next! Or maybe an Asimo to a Teddy Ruxpin.
I first read the comparison between a C64 and an iPhone and thought that was dumb, but I am surprised to see another "comparison" story.
Yes, back in the day, things were old and different, but comparing them really does not do much.
It might be more useful to compare an array of things like storage methods over time (washing machine platters, real to real tape, cassette, floppy, HD, zip, jazz, opti

If you're dealing with say, realtime embedded devices for managing air travel or life-support systems, sure.

But who cares how long it takes to boot your desktop or laptop? I reboot my laptop maybe once a week, the rest of the time it's either running or hibernating.

I'd rather have a slow boot up that verifies everything is working correctly than a fast one that skips sanity checks. It's not the OS that causes bootup slowness anyway but rather the 5400RPM honey-encrusted hard-drives that slow things down.

Drop an SSD HDD in and the time is reduced to trivial levels on any operating system.

I got through college in the 1980s with an Atari 800XL. Action! was the first programming language ever did anything interesting in, including two games- a vertical scroller and a side scroller. I remember side scrollers being harder because of the way the video memory was setup, or something. You had to do things in the video blank interval.

For classes, though, I also had QuickBASIC, Deep Blue C, Kyan Pascal and versions of Forth and FORTRAN. It was amazing how many languages were available for those things. I could write initial code at home before heading to the (always crowded) computer lab to enter the final version to be submitted for a grade.

I was a die-hard 800XL user for many years. At some point during the 80's or very early 90's, I remember an article in either Analog or Antic magazine that detailed how to get S-Video out of the XL's composite output. I built the connector with parts from Radioshack, but for no reason as I didn't have a single TV or VCR with an s-video input to try it out on.

That's not really the same. His comparison would be more like you putting your.22 rifle against my Heckler and Koch 91. Granted, the H&K 91 is a 1950s design based on a 1940s rifle but I bet you it will make things seem worlds apart.

Yeah, it's interesting... the microelectronics are, obviously, terribly outmoded... but in a lot of ways, the physical construction of those pcs from the 80's are far better than much of what we get today. I've held laptops in my hands that I swear I could shatter with a firm twist. Plus... keyboards have generally declined in quality.

I guess it's because materials technology/manufacturing has been pretty mature for decades; progress in the last 20 years has been focused on cutting cost and eliminating

Flame me if you want, but it seems like an Atari computer made in 1983 works better with peripherals than an Ubuntu does made in 2009.

Let's be honest - that's not saying much.

Seriously though, those early 8-bit computers were simply the greatest things ever for learning. They were small enough that you could comfortably learn them in a pretty complete fashion. My C64 Programmer's Reference Guide taught you everything you needed to know about that machine, supplemented by The Transactor, possibly the greatest technical computer magazine ever.

Switch into GRAPHICS 9 mode (16 shaded bitmap mode). Use a Display List Interrupt (DLI) to change the colors down the screen. You can arrange it to get a nice grid of 16 hues of 16 shades == 256 colors!

The paletted colors were actually only out of 128 colors. (16 hues of 8 shades)

More useful, though, are some of the software-driven tricks for drawing more colors on the screen. One simple one interlaces between 16-hue and 16-shade pixel modes, combining to give you any of 256 colors (albeit a little wash

I'm really fascinated by this stuff, as planning out how you're going to (ab)use the video hardware is key to getting the most out of these old machines - modern machines are so boring, with high resolution and unlimited colors, and no need for split screens and hblank trickery. I grew up on old Ataris but was too young (or too lame) to do anything but putter around in Basic at the time, and I love reading about the clever ways people have come up with to stretch the limits of the machine. I wish there were

Are you confusing the technically-unrelated ST line with the 400/800/XL/XE 8-bit computers?

The 8-bits certainly *could* have that many colours on-screen at once, with some limitations.

The reason was that the custom graphics chip let you change the palette (and/or graphics mode, sprite positions, etc.) on every new scan line if you wanted to. This wasn't an esoteric trick or hack, it was a standard part of the hardware and used by almost all half-decent games, though they didn't all necessarily use as ma

You probably mean the ST range, which competed with the Amiga. The 8-bit Atari computers (400/800/XL/XE) were a totally different range designed during a different era and with a different philosophy- i.e. state of the art (for their time) rather than affordability-oriented like the ST was.

The 400/800 are sometimes considered the spiritual predecessors of the Amiga, not least because some of the same people worked on them both. (And remember that the Amiga was designed by an independent company that was b